This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Like all wars, this one has produced a library of great books. If not solace, they offer at least a measure of wisdom for those of us who have the responsibility of remembering and understanding what happened.

Here’s 10 of the best in fiction and nonfiction, several by current or former writers for The Washington Post. The descriptions come from our previously published reviews:

The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer (2005). How could the strongest power in modern history, going to war against a much lesser opponent at a time and place of its own choosing, find itself stuck a few years later, hemorrhaging blood and treasure amid increasing chaos? Americans will be debating the answer for decades, and as they do, they are unlikely to find a better guide than this book.

The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins (2008). Filkins’s singular skill in this book rests in showing how war shatters lives and how some people manage to survive amid fear, violence, intrigue and chaos.

The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel (2009). Finkel follows the 15 months’ deployment of the Second Battalion, Sixteenth Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army. The deaths are tragic, but the injuries are most harrowing.

Ben Fountain’s debut novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers (2012). In this poetic novel written after the author served as an Army machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afarin, Powers moves gracefully between spare, factual descriptions of the soldiers’ work to simple, hard-won reflections on the meaning of war.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain (2012). In this razor-sharp, darkly comic novel — a worthy neighbor to “Catch-22” on the bookshelf of war fiction — the focus has shifted from bureaucracy to publicity, reflecting corresponding shifts in our culture.

Ten is an arbitrary number, of course. Please leave additional suggestions below in the comments section.

What led Walter Mosley, Jennifer Egan, Susan Orlean, Terry McMillan, Sebastian Junger and others to write? The reasons of a dozen writers — from the just-published collection ‘’Why We Write’’ — are honest, humorous and inspiring.

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What led Walter Mosley, Jennifer Egan, Susan Orlean, Terry McMillan, Sebastian Junger and others to write? The reasons of a dozen writers — from the just-published collection ‘’Why We Write’’ — are honest, humorous and inspiring.

1. Jennifer Egan — ''A Visit from the Goon Squad'' "When I'm writing, especially if it's going well, I'm living in two different dimensions: This life I'm living now, which I enjoy very much, and this completely other world I'm inhabiting that no one else knows about . . . I don't think my husband can tell.'' Henny Ray Abrams/AP

Ron Charles is the editor of The Washington Post's Book World. For a dozen years, he enjoyed teaching American literature and critical theory in the Midwest, but finally switched to journalism when he realized that if he graded one more paper, he'd go crazy.

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Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.